In 1967 the Overseas Press Club awarded Huet the Robert Capa Gold Medal for the "best published photographic reporting from abroad, requiring exceptional courage and enterprise".

The pilots of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force (RVNAF) UH-1 Huey carrying the photojournalists lost their way and flew into the most heavily defended area of the Ho Chi Minh trail, where Huet's chopper and a second one were shot down by hidden North Vietnamese 37mm anti-aircraft guns, killing all eleven on the photographers' aircraft and four on the other.

The crash site was rediscovered in 1996 and, two years later, a second search team from the Joint Task Force Full Accounting (JTFFA), the Pentagon unit responsible for recovering MIA remains in Indochina and elsewhere, excavated the mountainside.

After bureaucratic complications blocked efforts to bury the group remains on official ground, the Newseum in Washington, D.C. agreed to accept them and arranged in 2006 for their acquisition from JPAC.

The ceremony on April 3, 2008, which preceded the Newseum's own official opening by a week, was attended by more than 100 guests including relatives of Huet, Burrows and Potter, and many former Vietnam War colleagues.